I am all in favor of products that fit into existing workflow and have potential to make that workflow easier and/or faster. At first blush, A.nnotate seems to fall into that category. So the functionality is one that allows you to add comments, notes, etc to online documents - nice but I also like the thought they put into handing the notes. It appears that when you add a note, it goes into a private, searchable note index.All that is nice right but as I am reading their site, I'm thinking to myself, this is good but it will never fly with my organization. Really? You want us to load docs to your server AND load notes to your server as well? Not going to happen. THEN I got a great surprise when I clicked over to A.nnotate's "pricing" page and saw that one of their solutions is a "standalone" option with the service on an appliance that can be installed behind my firewall. Now I haven't even tried the free version of A.nnotate but I just want to say that it is refreshing to see a company that offers this right up front and not only that, they publish PRICES! Holy Cow A.NNOTATE, are you looking to turn things upside down?Here si the only problem with the pricing. The most expensive option only comes to about $10K for the first year and then $2K per year in maintenance after that. How am I ever going to be able to convince people that its worthwhile when it costs so little? :-)

I just bought this book and have started working through it - and the purchase was largely based on this interview. "Boellstorff makes the case that the counterpoint to virtual worlds is not the real world, but the actual. And that this virtuality includes two important things: it is virtual (of course, but he explores this with incredible insight and finesse) meaning that you are never QUITE there, and that this is incredibly important; and two, it is grounded in craft, in techne, and that virtual worlds may be a harbinger of a shift from a knowledge or information culture, into a craft-based one….or perhaps a mash-up of the two, what’s now coming to be known as "crafty knowledge"."I'm also happy to note that I said I was "working through this book" and just reading it. I like reading carefully researched work with footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies...I love work that pushes me down other avenues and I look forward to getting thru this book. **I should also include the link to Dusan Writer's Top 5 Virtual World Books.

(story link)"Open source software vendor Appcelerator has delivered the second preview release (PR2) of its rich Internet application platform for developers, called Titanium. As a way to help groups of developers collaborate more efficiently, the company has also thrown into PR2 Titanium Developer, social media and communications tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed, and a chat capability."So I didn't check while I was in Vegas on what the odds were on something that goes against AIR has but what do you all think? I know that its gonna be hard enough for me to get AIR past my IT people and it comes from Adobe. 

 So, the Chief of Staff at my little Defense Acquisition University came into my office late last week. This got my attention. He told me that he was aware that there were going to be some hiring needed to fill some new slots in our acquisition teaching corps. Then he said that he wanted to explore some of the more "2.0" ways that we could look for people to fill these slots. Part of reasoning is that these slots are kinda mid-career slots so the people looking at them might be early 30's maybe not long in terms of federal service or so on and they might be better tuned to those channels. I think he also just wants to try this stuff out that I've been talking about and see if it can actually do anything. Immediately, I put this call out to Twitter to see what I was missing or what ideas we could come up with. Here is what I got: 1. Twitter the jobs. Duh but thanks.2. LinkedIn. Good. That one could actually be productive.3. Listservs (Web Managers Listserv,) was the only one I could find - so if you have others and know the URL, lemme know4. Acquisition Community Connection: another easy one...So the meeting is tomorrow morning to review how we will do this...any last minute suggestions? Sen ;em in!Thx @govloop, @coelacanthro @adrielhampton @Quinnovator ...for the suggestions....

  (The Hero Factory)

This is so cool. Check out my network via Mailana.So you can put in your Twitter handle, your location or a search term like say "e-learning" and you get this awesome visual map back. Now according to this page, this network is using something like 210 million messages from almost 400,000 people. So what's cool about all this? Well, I'm still playing around with this but I find it very interesting that when you search on a term like "e-learning" - you get a map of the active conversations on Twitter on that topic. So you get to see who is talking to who, who is most active and you can even turn and go into those conversations. That's just tremendous. What's also tremendous is that this is just a demo of what Mailana is actually supposed to do. Evidently this tool was designed to extract meaning from corporate email systems. Now I want to get it installed at work! So now we get to the arrogant portion of the post - the part where I offer suggestions to someone as smart as Pete Warden about how to make this tool better - I want this as an AIR app...I want to see a drop down menu feature like the little gem in TweetDeck, I want that menu to allow me to follow people - maybe see their most recent tweets and so on...I want the "info" link to pop up the conversation in a side panel...Seriously, Mr. Warden, you've got like a mild form of attention-heroin here, with a little tweaking - it could become insanely addictive.

So, last week I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the TTI/Vanguard conference "re:Learning" in Washington, DC. Sure, I got to give my talk on virtual worlds and take questions from people like John Perry Barlow and Alan Kay (search Twitter for #ttiv for relevant Tweets) but we also got to see a demo from the forthcoming "Wolfram/Alpha Computational Search Engine" from Stephen Wolfram. This article is a nice write-up and actually has a couple links to other write-ups but in the interest of redundancy, I'll add my own. This is not a Google killer. They are different. Ask Google "coastline of England"and it'll return web pages that talk about the coastline of England. Ask W/A (sorry, just not going to type out 'Wolfram/Alpha' every time) that question and it will actually try to compute the distance of that coastline. Easy right? Its the difference between search and computation.The demos are fairly amazing in terms of the reults returned in terms of data display but there are some issues. The biggest one is that it currently runs on "Curated Data" - that is data sets that have been scrubbed specifically for the system. As I understand it, this process is partially automated and partially human-powered - that can present scaling issues. That doesn't bother me so much though because I really see this as an enterprise tool.So I work in Defense Acquisition - as you can imagine - our projects can generate HUGE amounts of data. Having access to a computational engine that would be able to troll that data and deliver answers not just search results could be ridiculously powerful. The bigger your data sets, the more powerful W/A becomes. My question(s) then is - what impact(s) do you see this having on or field? We all know how Google has impacted our learners (its their main tool for learning), what kind of impact will W/A have? Will wee need to teach different skills for dealing with an engine that computes versus searches?What kind of uses will be able to put this capability to inside our enterprise in support of our users?